The UC Berkeley Library is full of stories — and not just the ones that line its shelves. The facts you’ll find here are at turns dramatic, surprising, intriguing, and just plain bizarre, with topics ranging from a double-take-inducing architectural anomaly to a culture-defining concoction. (Hint: The latter one involves a Grateful Dead sound engineer.) If the knowledge you gain here doesn’t pierce the veil of what you thought the Library was, we hope it will at least spark a conversation — or seven. Here are some facts about the Library that you may not know.
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5. Safe harbor: Fearing that the fruits of French thought were in peril during World War I, France’s government sent thousands of volumes to the United States for safekeeping. They eventually were endowed to UC Berkeley, and the Library of French Thought — formerly occupying a room on the third floor of Doe Library — was inaugurated on Sept. 6, 1917.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
